Page 51 of Anarchy Chained: Alpha Thomas

We slam into the concrete walls of the tunnel and everything goes black.

I come to groaning, but obviously still alive. I’m hurt, but not dead. Never dead.

My skin has a grid of mesh embedded underneath it that will heal most wounds instantly. I don’t know how long I was out, but it was definitely longer than instantly.

But I can feel it working. It makes me sick to my stomach to know that shit is inside my body. Makes me want to hurl. Makes me want to rip my flesh off. Makes me want to… die.

“Sadie,” I croak out, the crash coming back to me. We are both encased in a coffin of train parts. “Sadie,” I say again.

I hear moaning from off to my left. But I can’t see her. Everything is dark and it feels like there’s a mountain of steel on top of me.

“Sadie,” I say again. More moaning.

I grab a long piece of twisted metal pinning my leg to the floor (roof?) of the car and push until I can bend my leg. I pull out my phone, thankfully still mostly intact, tabbing it awake so I can find my flashlight app.

There is an open gash in my leg. I’m talking visible bone.

But I can also see the little mesh framework doing its best to patch me up.

My fucking head spins just looking at it.

Case and Lincoln think I wear armor under my suits all the time because I’m paranoid.

I’m not fucking paranoid. Not about getting killed, at least. I don’t want to get hurt. I don’t want to be cut. I don’t want people to know what I am. What they did to me. And most of all—I do not want to see or feel this healing shit happening in real fucking time.

I force myself not to think about it. I force myself to ignore it. I force myself to move all the metal around me, bending it with my Prodigy-provided superhuman strength, until I’m free.

Then I go looking for Sadie.

She’s only a few feet away. The car—what’s left of the fucking car—wasn’t cut in half. We are in a section about eight feet long.

I think about Sadie’s suspicions about the gates. I’m gonna have to apologize to her. She was right. Nothing about us or our lives follows the laws of nature.

I pull the metal off her too and stop. Sickened at what I see.

She is… mending. Healing herself. The minuscule criss-crossed wires underneath her skin doing to her exactly what they do to me.

We are so much more alike than I ever thought possible.

Later. You can think about that later when she’s out of this tin can of a train car.

I lift each piece of metal, extracting her like one of those game pieces in that wooden puzzle tower, until she’s free.

She’s pale. Paler than I’ve ever seen her. Her face is cut, bleeding still. The little machines inside her—just little dots of charcoal-black, not even the size of a pin prick—slide along the mesh as they knit her biological components back together. Her dark hair is covered in a thin layer of white dust and debris. Her clothes are ripped, one of her legs is even more fucked up than mine.

But she will live.

If there’s one thing I won’t have to worry about, it’s that.

She will live. Because those fucking sickos at Prodigy did the same thing to her that they did to me. They fed little monsters into her bloodstream. They spent months torturing her with pain to get the framework established.

I have wanted to kill those Prodigy assholes for as long as I can remember. I have wanted to torture them the way they tortured me.

But the rage I feel right now…

It comes out as a mind blast that creates a wind of power. Pieces of hot, twisted metal move aside as I stumble forward.

Everything but her moves.